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How Social Media Marketing Can Help Grow Your Business

70 % of B2C (Business-to-Customer) organizations succeed in acquiring new customers using the social media platform Facebook alone. By 2020, this percentage will have gone up as the number of people using social media globally will skyrocket to a whopping 2.95 billion. These hundreds of millions of people don’t just browse casually through posts. They read, they interact, and most importantly, they purchase things. In fact, 84 % of VPs and CEOs admitted to relying on social media when making purchases. And it’s not just them. Everyone in the world is connected via the Internet, and social media is the platform where all these people come to interact every single day.

In a nutshell, social media provides a platform for businesses to showcase to millions of customers with different purchasing abilities from all around the globe. Wouldn’t it make sense to exploit this incredible marketing tool? It did, and it still does for about 84 % of B2B (Business-to-Business) organizations who religiously use social media as the powerful marketing tool it is, and with great success. So, why the hesitation? Are you still not sure how social media marketing can help your business expand beyond your wildest projections? If so, here are some of the benefits of using social media marketing.

1. Boosts Your Website Traffic

In a day and age where everyone has a site/page on the Internet, you would expect stiff competition for those precious first-page search engine result slots. As many have learned the hard way, you won’t get traffic simply because you have a really nice website. You need to tell people about it.

Social media can shed some light on your business’s online location if you use it correctly. A well-presented post has the ability to generate hundreds or even thousands of new visitors a day. Of course, this kind of online traction isn’t something everyone will have at the first try, but using the right strategies (and people) can get you there faster than you think.

2. Builds Relationships with Customers and Industry Leaders

Social media was created for the purpose of making human interaction on a global scale possible. It worked then and it’s getting even better now when organizations can simply send a tweet to keep their customers in the loop. The beauty of this is that it works both ways.

As a business, social media will give you unlimited insight into the lives of your customers, including what they like and what they don’t like, via their posts and updates. You can also keep up with industry leaders by studying how they interact with their customers. All this information is available for free on social media. You just have to learn how to use it.

3. Ad Targeting Is So Much Easier

Social media ads are highly customizable. You’ve seen how rapidly viral videos spread across the Internet. This is because the viral content was directed to the right people. Using the same logic, social media’s advertising capabilities are endless.

Facebook ads are a great example of how social media ads can be targeted. Not only does this feature let you filter your ad’s recipients based on their location, their areas of expertise, and their purchasing power, other features like Facebook Pixel now enable businesses to target and re-target the people who visit your site with tailored ads.

4. Can Earn You Media Coverage As Well

For the longest time, media coverage was the apex of brand marketing. It’s still important now, even with the Internet almost eradicating the need for media houses, and you can use social media to earn your 15 minutes in the spotlight quite easily.

If you attend events with media coverage, you’re already halfway there. Leveraging your social media presence at these events, say by posting from the event, can very well earn you some coverage if your brand pulls enough weight. Once again, it’s a numbers game, but with social media, you’ll always have the numbers behind you.

5. Reputation Management Is Much More Efficient

Responding to negative feedback has for a long time been the Achilles’ heel of many businesses, but not anymore. Social media gives you the power to act fast by addressing negative feedback and comments rapidly, thoughtfully, and professionally.

Regardless of how the disgruntled customer handles it, you will have protected your reputation by handling (or at least attempting to handle) the situation professionally.

6. Social Media Presence Cultivates Customer Loyalty

A strong social media presence attracts loyal customers. When you interact with your customers, they become more accustomed to seeing your brand, and obviously won’t go elsewhere when they need to purchase a product you offer.

By interacting with customers, we mean actually engaging and connecting with them on an individual level, not just shovelling outposts on product and service discounts. The key is to appear to them, not as a corporation, but as a group of normal people with a similar purpose, aim, or goal.

7. Anyone (Including Your Competitors) Can Benefit From It

Your competitors are already using social media, whether successfully or not, so what’s holding you back? 91 % of the world’s most popular brands own a social media page or two. That means that only 9 % of brands do not care about social media marketing, and these probably have their reasons for it. But if the majority has already seen that social media marketing is a business-growing opportunity in disguise, then there must be some truth to it.

Thanks to social media, getting the edge over your competitor has now become a matter of who was here first. If you’re late to the party, your competitors will surely take over your customers, but if you make the leap fast enough, the market is yours to corner.

8. You Can Aim the Spotlight at Your Business/Brand

A relatively modern phenomenon known as “newsjacking” has made social media even better for brands and businesses. It involves jumping onto emerging stories, usually with a humorous twist. It is alarmingly effective.

However, as Tide has demonstrated over the years, there is an art to newsjacking and a very delicate one at that. Jumping on the news about the blackout during SuperBowl helped them piggyback on a trending topic on Twitter some time back. Recently, however, a weird trend, one that involved people filming themselves while eating their latest product, the Tide Pod gave them both good and bad publicity. Ultimately, they had to pull the product from shelves following deaths from the mindless stunt.

Evidently, there is a process to newsjacking. If done right, there’s no doubt that it can lead to viral success for any brand.

9. Has A High ROI (Is Very Cost-Effective)

Arguably the best part about social media marketing is that you can do it without spending a dime. This is only if you’re comfortable (and skilled) enough to do it yourself. Otherwise, the cost of hiring a digital marketing agency is insignificant when compared to the sheer ROI social media marketing affords you.

10. Gives You the Chance to Discover and Be Discovered By New Customers

Lastly but certainly not least, social media marketing opens new doors for your business and/or brand. Picking from a pool of hundreds of millions of people is certainly a recipe for success, at least where marketing is concerned. New customers from different parts of the world will find out about you, and with the right type of ads and techniques, pay for your products and services. It is all a matter of being in the right place at the right time.

Conclusion

As you can see, social media marketing is one of the most effective marketing tools we’ve ever had at our disposal. Businesses and brands have risen from obscurity in a matter of days and weeks and toppled over global brands with limitless budgets. Thus far, it has levelled the playing field and made it possible for anyone to top the search engine results pages or to appear in trending news topics regardless of who they are.

We can help you get started with social media marketing, increase your revenue and dominate your competition. We’d like to provide you with a free consultation and then give you an honest assessment of the changes that we could make to improve your business. Contact us at +254743944748 to get started today!